Science and technology

Science and faiths

How to build a religion

FANCY founding a religion? Keen to reform a flagging faith? Here a few tips on how to attract and retain followers, thus ensuring that your gospel spreads far and wide, affording spiritual solace to as many souls as possible.

At the outset, you must realise that success is unlikely if you go wholly against the grain of human nature. Granted, religion is all about forging the perfect man, or at least ensuring that, as far as possible, he lives up to divine expectations. But preternatural power has forged man in such a way that he will swallow some of your ideas about how to achieve this more easily than others.

By stressing the right ones, then, you can do to give a fillip to the painstaking process of perfecting mankind. This is what some temporal powers have been doing of late, when trying to nudge their citizens towards individual choices which are more socially desirable, with notable success. You can do the same. This will, however, require that you rein in your dislike for a moment and listen to what those ungodly scientists have to say, despite their unremitting efforts to explain away the need for your enterprise.

As in the case of states, your principal concern is to encourage co-operation among your flock. In the long run, groups that co-operate more have an advantage over those whose members are less willing to do so. This also means limiting the number of actual and potential shirkers. People, it seems, are naturally inclined to do this anyway, but you can egg them on with a few simple tricks.

First, you are better off plumping for a personal god, rather than some sort of indeterminate life force. Research shows that people who profess a belief in such a deity judge moral transgressions more harshly, which in turn tends to make them more willing to abide by the rules, and expend resources on enforcing them. This may be down to a conviction that they are being incessantly watched over by an attentive minder, who tallies their contributions (or lack thereof) and rewards (or punishments) in a cosmic ledger. Speaking of which, incorporating the idea of just deserts is a fine plan, too. Apparently, people are born with an intuition to that effect. Just remember to keep the misfortunes visited on wrongdoers commensurate with their misdeeds. Otherwise people will think it unfair and won't buy it. No fire and brimstone for littering, and suchlike.

A corollary of all this concerns symbolism. Here, you would be wise to ensure plenty of eyes. (Obviously not too many; you don't want followers to grow too anxious and, heaven forbid, rebel.) Even subtle cues of that sort enhance co-operation. This could be because people subconsciously attribute the gaze to a supernatural sentinel, or to other people—human beings are loth to show an unwillingness to co-operate in the presence of others, too. Either way works for you. Incidentally, the secular state seems to have grasped this long ago, issuing banknotes whence historical figures (or, indeed, the all-seeing eye) incessantly stare at consumers and merchants.

However, such gentle nudges will only go so far. Sometimes, you need to be a bit more hands on. This is especially poignant in your selection of rituals. Certain constraints on human thought processes mean that you are faced with a choice between reliance on rare but traumatic experiences, like some gruesome Aboriginal initiation rites, on the one hand, and frequent, repetitive teachings, on the other.

Each has merit. Traumatic experiences ensure vivid recollection of everything connected to them, including the identity of the participants. Clearly, they must be rare-cause people too much physical and psychological grief and they will demur. If you don't overdo it, though, such events will create a strong bond within the group, whose members will, as a result, go so far as to lay down their lives for a fellow group member—collaboration doesn't get any closer than that. (Little wonder that army special forces and rebel groups use similarly onerous rites of passage.)

Alas, the obverse of this is an almost automatic animosity towards all outsiders. So, if growing in numbers is your thing, you should probably plump for doctrine rather than trauma. Abstract teachings are, however, less firmly etched into participants' minds. As such, the rituals will need to be repeated more frequently, constantly reinforcing the memories. This has the added bonus of making explicit your official interpretation of the faith. In the case of traumatic rituals, each person has a rich interpretation of the seemingly pointless terror they had to endure. Their bond is further strengthened because of the belief, probably mistaken, that all the others construe it in precisely the same way. Taboos are put in place to ensure they don't share their divergent thoughts out loud—that would, after all, bode ill for unity.

However, as the ranks of your congregation swell, such proscriptions become progressively harder to enforce. So, orthodoxy needs to be spelled out to limit the scope for doctrinal dissent. The rub is that followers may easily weary of repetition. You will need to strike a balance between being a dull doctrinaire and allowing too much interpretative freedom, with wayward schismatics stirring up trouble.

One way to mitigate this threat is to introduce occasional rites which are exciting and memorable, but in a positive way. Since euphoric experiences are less readily recalled than traumatic ones, these will need to be repeated every now and again (though not too often, for the spectre of interpretative freedom looms). Those dreaded scientists claim that once a year is about right. Another option is to let small groups get on with their thing, as the Catholic church does with the grisly re-enactments of the passion of Christ in the Philippines, complete with nails and crosses. Such rites inject new vim into the congregation as a whole, and keep the possible splittists happy.

Mind you, all the aforementioned advice will work only if you are truly committed to spreading the word, and prepared to settle in it for the long haul. Those pseudo-religious cults preying on human gullibility by promising fast-track salvation may prosper in the short run—at least their founders might. But as with any Ponzi scheme, they will one day tumble; there are only so many naïfs around.

A religion like yours, on the other hand, harnessing mankind's deep-seated proclivities, will continue to thrive indefinitely—or until human nature undergoes considerable change, which is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future. You, or strictly speaking your science-minded posterity, shall inherit the Earth.

The graveyard of dead deities we call mythology is filled with gods and religions that people once took as seriously as Christians take Christianity. It is 2010. The majority of intelligent people are just being polite and trying to not to hurt religious peoples' feelings at this point.

Very interesting and thought-provoking, but please beware of one pitfall. You may be tempted to examine existing religions that are in conflict with one another, and devise a new version that creates common ground to reconcile them.
That can be very risky. The founder of the Sikh religion tried to do this with Hinduism and Islam, and the Sikhs found themselves persecuted by both sides because they weren't either one. Similarly, the Bahai faith drew upon several major religions, emphasizing what they had in common, and the main result was that Bahais were ruthlessly persecuted.
In other words, being a peacemaker can be dangerous.

Romney Schield, the traditional way to publicly show miracles is to have the miracles occur thousands of years ago, so they are very hard to verify. Then write them into your sacred texts, so anyone who doesn't believe the so-called miracles can be dismissed as an apostate.

The three largest religions claim to worship the creator of the universe.
Their teachers have frequently publicly shown miracles to prove the correctness of their message and veracity of their teachings.
So how would the author propose to walk on water, cure the blind, and raise yourself from the dead.

Those cynical comments asking for recent miracles or actually verifiable miracles are being very rude. And are on the precipice of slide to something awful to behold.

Next, we'll have people asking the pope and pastors to provide shreds of actual evidence or sound reasons for their amazing claims about gods, devils, heavens, souls and other weird and wonderful metaphysical entities. And from there it is but a short step to pointing out that Allah equally requires a perfection of blind faith that cannot abide by such things as reason, justice or decency. And then it really will hit the fan - there is no reasoning with those so dead against reason and moral right as to die to protect their unholy trinity of unreason, falsehood and wilful ignorance.

This article conflates rites with religion. Maybe in some religions these are the same, but not always, and especially not with Sunni Islam, Protestant Christianity, or Orthodox Judaism (the big three in the western world). When you write about religion as someone saying 10 hail marys while fiddling with beads and talking to idols, then yeah, that sounds pretty crazy. Good job making a straw man.

But since we're on a technology blog for Economist.com, why don't we discuss the % of successful charities founded by religious vs non-religious people (even if the charities aren't overtly doing religious-y work). Or you could research charitable work by hours, or giving as % of GDP, grouped by "belief in God" versus "don't believe/care". Keep it to statistics and analyze them coldly, like a dismal scientist, perhaps? And then let's talk. Thanks.

Silty, I'm sure one purpose of the afterlife is to relieve the human fear of death. But another purpose is to maintain the unequal distribution of wealth.

Why were the church and the bishops in medieval Europe so much richer than than serfs? How do you convince the serfs not to demand a more equal distribution of wealth? In short, how do you stave off revolution?

Tell the people that God loves the poor, that the meek will get their just rewards in heaven, and that those who oppose the church will go to hell.

Another very popular (though not universal) feature of successful religions is to offer an afterlife, thereby affording some relief from the dread of one's own death and the sorrow of the final parting from one's loved ones. One very successful and widespread religion owes much of its early success to preaching the end of the world was close, but at the same time offering a path to a happy immortality.

There have been recent studies showing that the size of an animal's brain correlates to its species' sociability. Our higher brain centers have evolved largely for human interaction. So it is very difficult for us to assign meaning to a universe that doesn't have a human-like entity overseeing it.

In honor of Good Friday, perhaps a bigger problem is how a founder deals with the future problem of followers defecting and misunderstanding (or misusing) the original message.

In terms of rebellion, perhaps a balance of creativity and cohesiveness is needed, without too much unproductive outward judgment of outsiders and apparent shirkers. Trusting the personal God to hold others to account can free some from a need for temporal retribution ... because some may take longer to come to terms with the pointless trauma they endured for other faiths than others. Some say C.S. Lewis was a universalist, even if Napoleon or someone similar might take several millenia or more to turn back.

Science and faith do need to be partnered. Science is a method that can be used to improve systems of production and distribution, but creativity determines the direction of that inquiry. Creativity can be fueled by a vision of communal flourishing or of individual flourishing at the expense of another. Worrying about less litter could get pedantic, but worrying about less mercury in a mother's water source perhaps less so.

As for symbolism, Islam forbids any symbols . . . and some rebels have argued that the "all seeing eye" is in fact the eye of Horus, who required his own faith and sacrifices back in the day. I certainly feel I'm sacrificing something when I participate in a system built on scarcity, buying food and paying rent while others don't have food or shelter. Alas for an imperfect world, full of imperfect people.

You'd be wise to consider the origins of modern science before you set it against religion. More than the isolation of variables, science began as the suspension of philosophical and moral inquiries in scholarship. You sirs aren't talking science here.

"One way to mitigate this threat is to introduce occasional rites which are exciting and memorable, but in a positive way." .. like circumcision? Personally I prefer free coffee and donuts along with a 150% tax deduction. Other than that perhaps bungee prayer meetings might do it, but before the donuts and coffee, of course. But what about the good old days, witch burnings, inquisitions, fire and brimstone, animal sacrifices, human sacrifices and fertility rites with cult prostitution (male and female). Those were the good old days.

We are far away from wipping away the religion stuff from mind man who has an inner zest for everlasting life. The readers of a mazagzin at this level still call the idea a joke. Now think of people who are illiterate and live in Pakistan, India, the Arabs and.... We got a though job ahead.